great men who have played the first part on the world's stage. God knows, smoke is never wanting to obscure the light of the noblest actions: of Bolingbroke's political character, therefore, I will say nothing, but of his literary pretensions, I should be rejoiced to see a fair and liberal estimate. His philosophical writings have been characterized by Warburton with great severity, as containing the rankness of South, without his force, and the malignity of Marvell, without his wit. For the erection of his own system, he thought it necessary to ridicule or demolish every other. Not satisfied with occupying a vacant spot, of which several are to be found in philosophy and metaphysics, he set about clearing the whole region. His hand is against every man. The wise and thoughtful Cudworth becomes only a nonsensical paraphraser of nonsense; Wollaston is fit for an asylum; Clarke is a presumptuous rhapsodist; the venerable Sherlock is beaten down with a sneer. Yet he himself was, after all, the victim of what he calls the delirium of metaphysical theology. I should like to see the valuable parts of his works threshed out from the chaff that covers them; for, with all his errors and imperfections, Bolingbroke was an extraordinary individual: the influence he attained over the most celebrated of his contemporaries, proves that. "I really think," said Pope, "there is some thing in that great man which looks as if he was placed here by mistake." To me, the philosopher never appears in so attractive an attitude as when leaning in tears over the chair of the suffering poet*. A HINT FROM THE CHARACTERISTICS. LORD SHAFTESBURY calls the Rules of Art the Philosophical Sea Cards, by which the adventurous Intellects of the age are wont to steer. JEREMY TAYLOR, THE SPENSER OF PROSE. AND why should I not call Taylor a poet? Is not The Holy Living and Dying, a sacred and didactic poem, in almost as wide a sense of the word as the Commedia of Dante? What Bard of ancient or modern times has surpassed, in richness of language, in fertility of fancy, in majesty of sentiment, in e of imagery, this Spenser of English prose? To Taylor belonged the "believing mind" of Collins. With the romance of the early chroniclers he was deeply imbued. The spirit of discovery had then made little progress; and the knowledge actually acquired only served to kindle the darkness grace See Spence's Anecdotes. into a faint and uncertain twilight that magnified every object. In the "Lion-haunted Inland" was still supposed to lie A mystic city, goal of high emprise.-CHAPMAN. And its golden towers often flashed through the waking dreams of the poetical enthusiast. Nor think me too ardent in my admiration of this glory of our Church. Only take one or two specimens from the best known of his works, and say in what they are inferior to the sublimest poetry. The following is a picture : "All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness; the thousand thousand accidents in the world, and every contingency to every man and to every creature, doth preach our funeral sermon, and calls us to look how the old sexton, Time, throws up the earth and digs a grave, where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies till they rise again in a fair or an intolerable eternity." The next might have been copied from the notebook of Spenser. The "full eyes of childhood” is one of the finest images in the language. “Reckon but from the spritefulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial. For so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood; at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke the stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces." pen What has uttered sweeter things on children, or the delights of the domestic hearth. His sermon on the Marriage-Ring is more beautiful than any pastoral. how “No man can tell but he that loves his children, delicious accents make a man's heart to many dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges;-their childishness,—their stammering,their little angers,-their innocence,-their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society." He looked out upon nature with the eye and heart of a poet, and in the following passage seems to have anticipated Thomson in one of the most beautiful stanzas of the Castle of Indolence. "I am fallen into the hands of publicans and sequestrators, and they have taken all from me. What now? Let me look about me. They have left me sun, and moon, and fire, and water; a loving wife, and many friends to pity me, and some to relieve; and I can still discourse, and unless I list, they have not taken away my merry countenance, and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they have still left me the providence of God, and all the promises of the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my charity to them too; and still I sleep, and digest, and eat, and drink; I read and meditate; I can walk in my neighbours' pleasant fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights; that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God himself." Thomson has all the fervour of the poet, without the chastened submission of the Christian : I care not, Fortune, what you me deny; You cannot rob me of free nature's grace, You cannot shut the windows of the sky, Through which Aurora shows her brightening face. You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns, by living streams, at eve; How pleasant would it be to go on thus, if my |